WWE’s three main shows all received changes to the commentary teams, including Monday Night Raw, which sees the exit of Jimmy Smith. The new commentary and interview team for Raw will be Kevin Patrick, Corey Graves, Byron Saxton, and Cathy Kelley, and while Smith addressed his exit from WWE after the news broke in a Twitter post, he went into much greater detail on his time there during today’s episode of Unlocking the Cage. During that episode he also discussed how he found out he was not returning for the new season of Raw, which he says was accidentally revealed by Triple H ahead of this week’s episode of Raw, so he knocked out the episode while knowing he was probably not coming back the next episode.
“Triple H accidentally told me before the show Monday. He screwed up and told me [about the commentary changes]. He didn’t mean to. I’ll explain in a second. What happened was I was doing my prep for the show and we had a production meeting and on-air, Seth Rollins had cut a promo saying, ‘Hey, D.C. hates Riddle just as much as I do’ and so everybody in the production meeting turns to me and goes, ‘What did he mean? Do they have some kind of personal problem?’ Because I’m the MMA guy, right? And I said, ‘Well, Riddle’s been critical of fighter pay of the UFC and Daniel Cormier’s kind of considered a company guy’ so I go, ‘That could be what he’s talking about.’ That’s the only thing I could think of,” Smith said.
“So anyway, before the show, I go up to Riddle and I go, ‘Do you and D.C. have any kind of beef or problem?’ And he goes, ‘No, no, no! We’re cool.’ He goes, ‘He might be upset that I out-wrestled Jon Jones and he couldn’t,’ meaning he beat – the famous photo of Riddle first place on the podium at State and whatever place Jon Jones was. He beat Jon Jones wrestling twice in New York, whatever. So he goes, ‘Hey, he might be mad I out-wrestled Jon Jones twice.’ I go, Oh man, that’s a good line. Gotta use that”, Smith said.
“So I go to Triple H. Triple H standing there, I go, ‘Hey, I just talked to Riddle and he gave me this line about how he out-wrestled Jon Jones twice’ and Triple H goes, ‘Okay, cool. Give that note to Cole’ and I went, why would I have to give that note to Cole if I’m calling the match on Saturday? Oh. I’m not calling the match on Saturday. Oh, I’m probably fired. In about two seconds, my brain went, that’s so – okay… and I was like, all right. So I knew basically the whole show on Monday night that I wasn’t coming back so when I got the call Tuesday, I was not particularly surprised,” Smith said.
The new changes for Raw will start next week most likely, while SmackDown’s new team will start this Friday for the season premiere.
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